In On the Joke—Lynette Charity ’74
This article was originally published in the Winter 2022 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine. To view more digital Recorder stories, click here.
As an anesthesiologist, Dr. Lynette Charity ’74 has presided over hundreds of operations, but one Monday night at the Emerald of Siam Thai restaurant in Richland, Washington, she was uncharacteristically nervous.
It was her debut as a stand-up comic.
“I was scared to death,” Charity recalls.
“I was late getting there, still in my scrubs, waiting to go on. Someone asked if I wanted something to drink, and I said ‘I need some liquid courage!’ and had a glass of wine. The open mic was supposed to start at nine, but by 10:30, I still hadn’t gone on. I had another glass of wine, and then finally I heard ‘And now, for your comedic entertainment, Lynette Charity!’ And I’m looking around, and finally go, ‘Oh, that’s me!’”
Charity got up on stage and did her set. “Some jokes hit, some missed, but I did it,” she says. “I did it, and I felt good. And the next day I went back to work, and said, ‘I’m going to be a stand-up comic.’”
And reader, as you’ll see—what Charity wants, Charity gets.
Take high school. Even though Brown vs. Board of Education had happened in 1954, Virginia “didn’t get the memo,” says Charity, and it wasn’t until 1966 that they started to integrate Black children into white high schools. Charity wanted to go to the white high school in her town. “My mom was very afraid for me because it was that time where it could be dangerous for you to be around certain communities, so she said no,” says Charity, “so I forged her name on the slip.” She was 14 at the time.
But if Charity thought her problems had ended, she was wrong. “I did not know how to apply to college, so I go to the guidance counselor and she says ‘Lynette, why in the world do you want to go to college?’ and I said ‘I want to become a doctor,’” recounts Charity. “’Now you might be able to get into one of those Negro colleges, but no medical school is going to take a colored girl,’ said the guidance counselor, and she wouldn’t help me. So, I went home very frustrated by this, and as soon as I get home my mom meets me at the door and says “Guess who just called you – some lady from some school. She’s going to call you tomorrow.”
Enter Chatham.
The lady was Peggy Donaldson, director of admissions at Chatham, with a tempting offer: a bus ticket to visit Chatham. Charity made the 22-hour ride and interviewed with Donaldson. “The only question she asked me was ‘Would you like to come to Chatham,’” says Charity. “And I said yes, but my thing was, Chatham was $3K back then and my dad made $6K, and she goes ‘I didn’t ask you that, I asked if you wanted to come to Chatham.’”
Come to Chatham she did. “It was just so exciting,” Charity says. “I wasn’t sure if Chatham was going to be the right fit because it was a liberal arts school and I wanted to go to med school, but the sciences even at that time were plenty, and I got accepted to medical school my junior year at Chatham. I loved my classmates, and I loved Chatham. That’s why I’m on Chatham’s Board of Trustees today. If it had not been for Chatham College, there would be no Lynette Charity, MD.”
“One thing that Chatham did back when I was in school was to send out a questionnaire about whether you would be willing to room with someone not of your race. And I said ‘yes,’ and my roommate at the time and my dear friend now for 50 years, Cathy Cusack, said ‘yes.’ And I tell people we were the ebony and ivory of Chatham College. We showed people that color was superfluous. She was a history major and I was a biology/chemistry double major, but we were joined at the hip.”
Charity graduated from Chatham, attended the Tufts University School of Medicine, met her husband, had children, and became one of the first female Black anesthesiologists in the United States, practicing for 42 years. Still, something was missing.
Dr. Charity, You’re funny!
“I think I suppressed my funny bone, and any other bones I had, because all I had ever wanted to do was be a doctor, and I was staying the course,” she says. “But as I got older, I’d be doing cases and someone would say ‘Dr. Charity, you’re funny!’ And I’d go, “Am I? It was like ‘well, maybe I can give this a shot.’”
Charity joined Toastmasters, the international public speaking club, and quickly realized another of her talents. “Whatever I try, I just go into it and do it,” she says. “I won a lot of awards in Toastmasters.” In 2014, she competed in the semi-finals of the World Championship of Public Speaking held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and won a third-place trophy for her speech.
Charity met some people through Toastmasters with comedy backgrounds, and, inspired, began writing jokes about what else? Being an anesthesiologist.
“I started working with coaches and did some improv, because I wanted to be able to be in the moment”, says Charity. At the same time, she started a professional speaking business, speaking on physician burnout, depression, and suicide. “I used my own experiences and told stories, injected a lot of humor in my presentations.”
As far as inspiration for her comedy goes, Charity looks to the storytellers. “I don’t like a lot of the younger comics that just work blue,” she says. “There’s no reason for anyone to have to use profanity in a joke. Wanda Sykes does work blue, but some of her stories are just wonderful. I look at her standup over and over again, just looking at the nuances of how she does it. And Jim Gaffigan. I saw him, and I thought, ‘I’m sold, I’m going to follow this guy and figure out how he does it.’ I do a lot of mind mapping—my life is rich with a lot of stories, but how do I turn those stories into comedy gold?”
“My jokes and what I do will be as clean as I can make it,” says Charity. “Like, I’ll tell jokes about my husband, but I’ll say ‘I’ve been married to my husband for 43 years. They said it’d never work. He’s a Protestant, I’m a Baptist. They sprinkle, we dunk!’”
Charity prepares by recording herself in her at-home office. “I want to see where the jokes fall flat,” she says. “I’m always tweaking them to make them less wordy.” She still gets nervous before she performs, she says. “I’m not nervous being a doctor, but getting up in front of a bunch of strangers, and trying to make them laugh is very scary. But when I’m doing it—once I start, and I’m in the moment, I’m better. I still have butterflies at the beginning, though.”
Giving Back to Chatham
Jokes aside, after graduation, Charity continued her involvement with Chatham, serving as Class Agent (2004-2006), Class Secretary (1994 and 2000-2005), and Reunion Class Chair (2004). She was also the recipient of Chatham’s Cornerstone Award for Medicine and Science (1998), William Trimble Beatty Award (2010), and, most recently, the Distinguished Alumna Award (2019). Charity has served on Chatham’s Board of Trustees twice—first from 1997-2012, and again since 2019 for her current term.
“The most important thing that I would like people at Chatham to understand is that Chatham has gone through a metamorphosis—just like me. And it is an amazing institution, and for any alums from there, who have not thought to give their alma mater something, just think about the future. It’s a wonderful liberal arts college, it’s in the heart of a vibrant city, and it actually graduates comedians.”
“If it had not been for Chatham College, there would be no Lynette Charity, MD.”
So what does a Lynette Charity set sound like?
“I start out, ‘Hi everyone. My name is Lynette Charity and I’m 70 years old.’ There you stop, because you want to let people clap. ‘I’m an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep by passing gas. And then I say and by night, I make people laugh by passing gas—and then I do a thing where I fan my backside. ‘Becoming an anesthesiologist was hard. It took four years of college, of medical school, and of residency training. It was my version of 12 Years a Slave. Listen white people, I can tell that joke so you can laugh. Now you need to understand: Med students don’t make money while they’re doctoring. They must get it on the back end. Especially those proctologists.’”
